IBM announced today that the company has begun producing a
new, 65-nanometer version of the Cell Broadband Engine at IBM's
state-of-the-art East Fishkill, New York microchip production facility.

Cell processors found in current Sony PlayStation 3 consoles
and IBM BladeCenter servers are manufactured on a 90-nanometer process.
Shrinking a chip’s die allows more processors to be produced per wafer, a key
factor in driving down production costs.

Sony is desperately trying to reduce the costs of its
PlayStation 3, as each console is still being sold below cost of manufacture.
iSuppli estimates that each Cell chip costs Sony $89, more than a tenth of the
entire bill of materials for the PlayStation 3. The shift to 65-nanometer would
significantly reduce the cost of the Cell processor.

Aside from costs, other advantages of moving to a smaller
process include lower power consumption needs, less heat production—both of
which potentially leading to more reliable systems.

Moving to 65-nanometer is just another method for Sony to
cost reduce its console. Last month, Sony announced that its European PlayStation
3 consoles will ship without
the Emotion Engine chip, a component used for backwards compatibility with
PlayStation 2 games, in an effort to save $27 in material costs.

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Are you sure you have your information correct? The SPE's in the Cell are not in the IBM processor for the X360. They were designed entirely different. The X360 processor is triple core, as well, from what I remember.

The Processors are indeed different, The Xbox 360 has 3 cores and a form of hyper threading. (Theoretically 6 cores - different implementation than that of the Pentium D/4 thus performance is un-gaged)

"The chip features a customized version of IBM's industry leading 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than

3 GHz. It features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90 nanometer Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology to reduce heat and improve performance. The chip's innovative 21.6 GB/s Front Side Bus (FSB) Architecture was customized to meet the demanding throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 gaming platform software."

http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/news/2005/1025_xbox.ht...The Cell uses 1 standard purpose powerpc core. Which is SIMILAR to one of the Xbox 360's though it doesn't have hyper threading support. The synergistic processing units on the other hand are completely different...

I only said the PPC core was the same, not the SPEs. Yes its not 100% the same but the two are very similar. Hyperthreading most likely can be enabled or disabled like with Intel's processors. The support is there, Intel just doesn't give it to us.

Cell's ( ARGH DailyTech stop moving the cursor to the Subject line will you ) PPU can do two threads. It's a slightly updated and tweaked version of the PPU used in the XBox 360's processor. As with any SMT implementation the second thread does not increase performance vastly (athough it will be better than Netburst simply because of the in-order design of the PPU leaving more unutilised units).

The rest of the processor is vastly different however, as you say.

[In my opinion Cell for the PS3 would have been better with 2 PPUs and 4 SPUs instead of 1 PPU and 8 (7) SPUs. Still the SPUs are good for physics and media.]

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